Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss to face off in final round of Tory leadership race

Read More

Liz Truss will face Rishi Sunak in the final round of the Conservative leadership, after a dramatic final day of voting by MPs which saw Penny Mordaunt knocked out of the race, having been second in every previous round.

The fifth and last vote by MPs saw Sunak, the former chancellor, top the poll easily on 137 votes. Truss, the foreign secretary, who had trailed Mordaunt throughout the previous rounds, took 113 votes, just ahead of Mordaunt’s 105.

Sunak and Truss will now go to the next stage of the contest, a vote by Tory party members, with the winner succeeding Boris Johnson as prime minister in early September.

The result means that a race which began with eight candidates, gradually whittled down over rounds of increasingly dramatic voting, has ended up with the final two being as many would have predicted long before Johnson was removed from office.

Sunak and Truss have clashed bitterly over policies such as taxation and borrowing, and the next few weeks of the campaign could be equally brutal.

In a statement, Mordaunt congratulated the others but called on them to end the fighting: “Politics isn’t easy. It can be a divisive and difficult place. We must all now work together to unify our party and focus on the job that needs to be done.”

When the contest began Sunak was the favourite, despite the emergence in April of his wife’s non-domiciled tax status and his own possession of a US green card for a period when he was chancellor. He topped the MPs’ vote in every round, and always seemed likely to progress.

In contrast, Truss’s supporters will view her last-minute overtake of Mordaunt as a sign her momentum could propel her into No 10. The foreign secretary’s campaign began slowly, hampered by a somewhat wooden style and mixed performances in TV debates, where Sunak more than once castigated her proposed programme of tax cuts and untested monetary interventions.

With postal ballots for party members due to start landing on doormats as early as 1 August, both candidates’ teams will immediately start the next phase of the campaign.

Truss’s views are widely seen as more in tune with those of party members, notably her focus on tax cuts and a smaller state, whereas Sunak will seek to campaign as a more serious candidate, one better able to cope with immediately crises such as the cost of living.

The vote closes at 5pm on 2 September, with the winner to be announced on 5 September. They would most likely formally become prime minister a day afterwards.